HowardForums is a discussion board dedicated to mobile phones with over 1,000,000 members and growing!

For your convenience HowardForums is divided into 7 main sections; marketplace, phone manufacturers, carriers, smartphones/PDAs, general phone discussion, buy sell trade and general discussions. Just scroll down to see them!

Only registered members may post questions, contact other members or search our database of over 8 million posts. Why don't you join us today!

This isn't going to be terribly convenient for those of us in the Eastern Time Zone but it's still good news, I think. On the heels of an r/OnePlus rumour comes official confirmation from the OnePlus Blog: starting this week (I think?) the OnePlus One will be available for purchase every Tuesday, no invite required.

The open sales window will start, as per the image above, at midnight if you live on the West Coast, 3am on the East Coast. If the latter is too early (or late) for you, you can still use an invite the other six days of the week.
...

Finishing off the week with a public service announcement: You can pre-order the Saygus V² at a special price until tomorrow night at 11:59pm Mountain Standard Time. What on earth is the Saygus V²? Right, I should probably explain that!

Let's start with the company itself... Utah-based Saygus has been manufacturing Android-powered phones since at least 2009. Their claim to fame, according to their website, is that they are "the only smartphone startup to ever receive certification from a US carrier". That carrier would be Verizon and the device in question would be the Saygus VPhone V1. I can't find any evidence that it actually ever made it onto Verizon store shelves.

Anyway, six years later Saygus is back with what they're calling the V². Set to ship in 6 to 8 weeks, it shares a number of features with my favourite Android devices, adding some notable improvements to the mix.
...

I get a lot of inspiration for what I write here from listening to podcasts. Rain or shine, I try to put aside an hour or so somewhere in my day to take a long walk and listen to someone else talk about tech for a change. These days it's snow that I have to contend with, but thankfully I've an ingenious and near-disposable solution to keep the wet stuff off of my phone.

Last week I caught a thread on reddit wherein a user conducted a survey of the r/Android community in an attempt to figure out the most popular screen size for an Android-powered phone. Though the results could apply to any smartphone the survey was carried out on a subreddit specific to Android, so I should probably follow suit and post this in the Android forum here.

As my first week with Android 5.0 "Lollipop" continues there's so far not much to report. The KitKat versions of many apps have already been updated to conform with the new material design standard. To be honest there's really only one issue I'm having with this latest incarnation of stock Android:

Everything is so blindingly bright!

I realize this is personal preference so speaking personally, I can't stand the white background that seems to be all over this Nexus 6. In some places it makes sense; reading large blocks of text—in a web browser, for example—works with dark text on a light background because it's a better approximation of ink on paper. But in other places—like menus and settings—it just doesn't work at all. At least not for me.

Fortunately I'm running a custom ROM, so there's an easy fix—today in the form of CyanogenMod's theming engine.
...

Unless I'm mistaken, the Nexus 6 is still the only Android phone currently shipping with Android 5.0 "Lollipop". Similarly, the N6, along with the Nexus 9 tablet, is one of only a few available devices with an unlockable bootloader, allowing the user to realize the full potential of the Android platform if they so choose.

Well, I indeed so choose, and today I'm here with a brief report of what to expect when rooting an Android L phone.
...

Howard was kind enough to let me borrow his unlocked, 32 GB space grey—sorry, "Midnight Blue" Nexus 6, to see if it really is as despicable as I've made it out to be. This former Nexus fan has made no secret of his strong dislike for 2015's hackable, "pure Google" phone experience. But despite what you might think, I'm open to having my mind changed. And to neutralize my scorn I picked up a few accessories at the Dollar Store on my way home from meeting up with Howard.

I can only guess that a bunch of you clicked on the referral link at the end of my post about ZenBanx the other day, as my invite code showed up in my inbox just after dinner last night... Thanks for that!

Today I'm going to walk you through the process of setting up a ZenBanx account—that is, everything short of connecting it to your existing bank of choice. Though technically not a bank proper (hence the word "banx" in the name) you are, for all intensive purposes, setting up an account with the DUCA Credit Union of Ontario. And you're doing so entirely on your phone.

I remember during my first visit to Japan in 2001 wandering through a kitschy shop in Tokyo dumbfounded by what I saw—here in the land of the world's first successful mobile Internet service I was surrounded on all sides by discarded Motorola merch from the 1980s. T-shirts, coffee mugs, Frisbees... all adorned with that instantly-recognizable stylized "M". And this was years before the RAZR ever saw the light of day.

I believe that marketing people call this "brand equity".

So it's probably little wonder that Lenovo, Moto's new owner, would capitalize on that brand equity and offer Motorola handsets in their home market of mainland China. That's the story making the rounds in the tech blogs this week, including GizChina, Android Police and The Verge.

But what if the reverse were true? What if Lenovo smartphones, tuned for LTE data in the Americas, were available for purchase here? Were that the case I might well be the proud owner of a VIBE X2, pictured above.
...

Not a fan of the name but I'm really excited about ZenBanx. Here's why:

After having an ING Direct Canada account for many years I finally got serious about it, closing my Scotiabank account and transferring all funds to ING, only to see the former buy up the latter only a few months later. This all went down in 2012; unbenownst to me ING Canada's founder, Arkadi Kuhlmann, started working on a new forward-thinking banking venture right about then. This morning that venture is open for invites in Canada, and it's called (perhaps unfortunately) ZenBanx. Here's the pitch:

Today’s world is mobile; you can jump on a plane and go just about anywhere, but your money can’t follow as easily. ZenBanx will change that.

For someone who really enjoys travelling and really hates fiddling with paper currency, this could be a godsend.
...

So i activated my phone with koodo with a local number and i went to change it on koodo self serve and it wont let me change the province, it says please call us if you would like a number in another...